Southwest Builder Receives Project of the Year, Single-Family Production Builder at 2011 National Green Building Conference
May 31, 2011
Imagine Homes picked up one of 13 awards presented to members of the homebuilding industry at the National Association of Home Builders annual conference April 30-May 2. Leadership within Imagine Homes has been working with IBACOS® since 1997 and the company has received three NAHB® Green Building Awards since 2008.
Based in Pittsburgh, PA, IBACOS is a research and consulting organization that works to improve the quality and performance of homes. They are a team leader for the Department of Energy’s Building America® program and the founder of the Best Practices Research Alliance, a collaborative research-based community of which Imagine Homes is an active member.
The award recognized Imagine Homes’ high performance home in the Cibolo Canyons community of San Antonio, Texas. IBACOS building performance specialists worked closely with the homebuilder on the project, executing all modeling and evaluating both the cost-effectiveness of design features and their proper installation. IBACOS also installed a monitoring system to track the home’s energy use.
“We’ve worked with IBACOS over the last 15 years to test and refine ideas, collaborating on new ways to build homes and that work has all led to where we are now,” said John Friesenhahn, Imagine Homes co-founder.
The home, a Building America project, was designed to use 40% less energy than an average new home of the same size built to the 2009 International Residential Construction Code (IRCC). The IRCC was adopted by the City of San Antonio starting in 2010.
Imagine Homes currently offers homes that are 30% more energy efficient than a typical new home and 60% or more efficient than a typical 10-year-old-home. The 40% level of the award-winning home is expected to become the new standard for Imagine Homes in the near future, said Friesenhahn, but is currently offered as an option.
“IBACOS helped us advance our building and business practices and develop new strategies to manage change in our business,” said Friesenhahn. “They worked hard to make sure what we did in this house is reproducible across a broad scale, and that is our goal.”
Ari Rapport, the IBACOS building performance specialist who was project manager on the award-winning home, said there are several things about its construction that set it apart.
“San Antonio is a hot, humid climate, so the thermal enclosure is very well-sealed and insulated,” he said. “And there’s the fact that the attic roof is insulated with spray foam, which gives the house a semi-conditioned attic for their HVAC system to be housed in.”
Also notable, he added, is the home’s use of high-efficiency heating and cooling equipment, which includes a 17 SEER-rated air conditioner, and a 2 kilowatt solar PV panel system on the roof.
“The monitoring system IBACOS installed will track the data about electric and natural gas use, indoor and outdoor temperatures, relative humidity, solar radiance and more so we can see the home’s real-world performance,” said Rapport.
For more information about the award-winning home’s features, go here. For the Alliance profile of Imagine Homes, visit here.
About Imagine Homes Imagine Homes was founded by Jim Bastoni and John Friesenhahn in 2006 as San Antonio’s first homebuilder certifying every home in three prestigious programs, ENERGY STAR®, Build San Antonio Green® and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Builders Challenge. Imagine’s commitment to green building earned the builder the 2008, 2009 and 2011 National Association of Home Builders® Green Building Awards, a 2010 and 2011 Energy Value Housing Award® and City of San Antonio Green Building Awards in 2009 and 2010. More info at www.imaginehomessa.com/
About IBACOS IBACOS® enables production homebuilders to improve the quality and performance of their homes by providing ‘whole house’ expert services, e-tools and information. IBACOS provides technical and business management expertise in the areas of Quality Assurance (implementing a comprehensive quality program), Risk Management (solving immediate construction defect issues), and Performance Coaching (taking steps to achieve higher standards). To catalyze tomorrow’s best practices and expand on its efforts as a team leader for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building America program, IBACOS has assembled its Best Practices Research Alliance, a collaborative innovation ‘community’ of leading builders and suppliers. To learn more, visit www.ibacos.com/ and www.theresearchalliance.org.
Contact
Elizabeth (Betsy) Scott
escott@ibacos.com
Phone: 412-325-1514
2214 Liberty Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15222
